Jeremiah Coogan (USA)

Jeremiah Coogan
MPhil in Judaism & Christianity in the Graeco-Roman World

My research focuses on the intersection between book history and biblical literature in early Judaism and early Christianity. I work closely with papyrus and parchment manuscripts, attending particularly to the material culture of ancient texts and the methodological insights of the ‘new philology’. At Oxford I took the MPhil in Judaism and Christianity in the Graeco-Roman World, with a dissertation on ancient Jewish and Christian anthologies of biblical poetry.

I am grateful to Mica and Ahmet Ertegun for their generosity in funding my studies at Oxford. The Ertegun programme enabled me to study with top-notch faculty in my field. Oxford also provided a superb location for manuscript studies, both in the magnificent Bodleian collections and through the proximity of major manuscript libraries throughout Europe. Finally, the collegial and interdisciplinary environment of Ertegun House offered a rich academic community, equally rigorous and good-humoured, which I remember with gratitude.

 

Academic Publications

2023                 “Reading (in) a Quadriform Cosmos: Gospel Books and the Early Christian Bibliographic Imagination.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 31, no. 2 (forthcoming). 

2022                 Eusebius the Evangelist. Cultures of Reading in the Ancient Mediterranean. Oxford: Oxford University Press (forthcoming).

2022                 “Ordering Gospel Textuality in the Second Century,” co-authored with Jacob Rodriguez. Journal of Theological Studies (forthcoming).

2022                 “The Reception of Jubilees in Catena Manuscripts of Genesis.” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 31, no. 4 (forthcoming).

2021                 “Gospel as Recipe Book: Nonlinear Reading and Practical Texts in Late Antiquity.” Early Christianity 12, no. 1: 40–60.

2021                 “Transforming Textuality: Porphyry, Eusebius, and Late Ancient Tables of Contents.” Studies in Late Antiquity 5, no. 1: 6–27.

2020                 “Transmission and Transformation of the Eusebian Gospel Apparatus in Medieval Greek Manuscripts.” Pages 29–46 in Canones: The Art of Harmony. The Canon Tables of the Four Gospels, ed. Alessandro Bausi, Bruno Reudenbach, & Hanna Wimmer (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 18; Berlin: de Gruyter).

2019                 “Appendix: The Odes.” Pages 539–572 in Textual History of the Bible, vol. 2: Deuterocanonical Scriptures, part 2C; gen. ed. Armin Lange; vol. eds. Frank Feder & Matthias Henze (Leiden: Brill).

2018                 “Divine Truth, Presence, and Power: The Christian Book in Fourth-Century Roman North Africa.” Journal of Late Antiquity 11, no. 2: 375–395.

2017                 “Mapping the Fourfold Gospel: Textual Geography in the Eusebian Apparatus.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 25, no. 3: 337–357.

 

Fellow scholar Walter Beers and I also organised an interdisciplinary conference on ‘Syriac Intellectual Culture: Translation, Transmission, and Influence’ at Ertegun House on 30–31 January 2015.

Life after Ertegun House

I completed my PhD in Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity at the University of Notre Dame. My first monograph, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2022, analyses Eusebius of Caesarea’s fourth-century reconfiguration of the Gospels as a window into broader questions of technology and textuality in early Christianity and the late ancient Mediterranean. Following my PhD, I returned to Oxford as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in the Faculty of Theology and Religion (2020–2022).